A few more words:The assassin bug cloaks itself with debris from the surroundings to infiltrate the nests of its prey. When it has killed its prey it suck out its innards so it can use the lifeless husk to lure more prey to it.

Willard Wigan is a micro-sculptor: his creations, ranging from the Homer and Bart Simpsons above to Betty Boop, are all small enough to fit on the head of a pin or in the eye of the needle.

And it’s not just cartoon characters that Wigan sculpt, he’s created a mini-moonlanding, a mini-Mad Hatter’s tea party and a bunch of other artworks that you can only admire through a microscope.

It’s not easy creating these miniature works of art, when even traffic on the streets outside can make Wigan’s hand shake at a crucial moment. He has figured out how to slow his heartbeat and sculpt between pulse beats, and often works through the night when things are quieter outside. Once he accidentally inhaled the entire sculpture. His “brush” might be a single hair from a house fly, or a single shard of diamond attached to a pinhead. [The X-Change Files]

If someone will only commision him to sculpt some miniature angels we can finally put that deep philosophical question to rest, too.

The paper sets up mathematical models for the outbreak of Romero-style zombies (lumbering, flesh-eating, undead) and discusses how best to deal with an epidemic of infectious zombies. Here’s an excerpt from the paper:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties or, diseases with a dormant infection.

This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first mathematical analysis of an outbreak of zombie infection. While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is nevertheless instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual outbreak.

The conclusion of the paper is that a zombie outbreak is likely to destroy civilization unless swift and decisive action is taken to violently eradicate the zombie threat. An epidemic could be contained with an aggressive implementation of quarantines, and if a cure were to be developed that would be another possible solution, but it would be unpractical.